


hell is empty

by deckards



Series: real gods require blood [2]
Category: Doctor Strange (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-02
Updated: 2017-03-02
Packaged: 2018-09-27 23:20:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10056533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deckards/pseuds/deckards
Summary: part two ofreal god require blood.things may seem calm, but there are still questions to answer, threads to tie up, and a devoured soulscape to account for.





	

**Author's Note:**

> it’s taken ages, but i’ve finally made a start on part two (of three) of this story. thanks to everyone who’s still sticking around. i hope you enjoy this---and i hope i can keep the updates coming in a timely manner.
> 
> shout out to karson, em, and harley who have helped me out immeasurably through various stages of this story’s development, and stuck by me when all i did was scream at them.

 

> my people had a saying long ago: “the healer has the bloodiest hands.” you cannot treat a wound without knowing how deep it goes. you cannot heal pain by hiding it. you must accept. accept the blood to make things better. you have taken the first step. that is the hardest part.
> 
> \---- solas, _dragon age: inquisition_

 

 

_fifty-one years ago_

It was the kind of cold that could snap a man’s balls clean off. There were snow drifts piled above my head and the entire landscape was nothing but frozen white dunes and blue shadows. The wind had whipped the surface of the snow into a crust that crunched under my boots, sometimes giving way to a metres deep hole, sometimes remaining frozen, shooting my feet out from under me like I was trying to walk on an ice rink.

I crashed through a slab of wind affected snow, burying my right leg from the waist down. I said, “Dammit, Wong! How much further is this place? I’m freezing my fucking balls off out here!”

Wong turned. He didn’t seem to be having the same trouble navigating as I was. He watched me panting and cursing, struggling to free myself as snow settled in my boots and melted into a glacial lake around my toes. “Patience, Strange,” he said. I could see the smirk glimmering in his eyes as he carried on, walking away with the unassuming grace of some kind of mystical elf. The smug bastard.

Between there and the ice cave I lost track of how many holes, craters, crevices, and pits I stumbled into and clawed back out of. Wong was waiting at the entrance, framed against the deep indigo maw and looking perfectly composed. My face was numb from being blasted with wind, my entire body soaked in sweat, my lungs burning from choking down ragged gulps of frigid air, my legs screaming with exertion.

“Fucking,” breath, “finally,” I panted.

“Pull yourself together, Strange. You’re supposed to be a sorcerer.”

I clutched at a stitch in my side and stumbled the last few feet to Wong’s side. “Magic,” I was going to die, “doesn’t,” on this deserted, “work,” fucking mountain, “for me.”

“It is because you are unworthy.”

“Yes,” I said, still gasping and sputtering. “So you’ve said.”

Wong sighed. “And yet the Ancient One insists you have some worth.”

If I wasn’t dying of asphyxiation, I would have stood up straight and fixed Wong with one of my finest, most shit-eating grins. Instead I put my hands on my knees and puffed frozen clouds of mist at the ground.

“Come on, Strange. I have no intention of failing at my training, even if it means dragging your useless American ass all the way to the Truth Teller and back.” He gave me a look like he might have been examining something particularly nasty stuck to the bottom of a dumpster and strode away.

“I’ll have you know,” I said, stumbling to my feet, “that my ass is far from useless.”

The words echoed around me and then were swallowed in darkness. Up ahead, Wong lit a torch. Flame from the Vishanti. His speciality was supposed to be the martial arts, not magical ones, and yet he insisted on showing off. The pompous prick.

I fumbled in my pockets for a lighter and pulled it out in front of me and clicked it on. It guttered and expired and tumbled from my fingers, clacking across the rocky ground. “Fucking gloves,” I muttered. My hands were shaking again, burning again. Still useless, after all this nonsense.

The warm light from Wong’s torch cast long, sinewy shadows across the craggy walls. They danced and darted, flickering like demonic apparitions. I watched them as I walked along behind him. The air had turned stale: musty, like an abandoned basement. One of the fluttering wraith forms was curling around the roof, bending around a collection of stalactites and—“Oof,” I said as I wandered into something solid and stumbled backward.

The something solid was Wong. “The fuck?”

He didn’t answer. I rubbed at my jaw, wondering if his skull was thick enough to cause a bruise, and began to continue with my cursing when I looked up.

I said, “Oh.”

In front of Wong was a massive creature. It was shaped like a man, like a king out of some Arthurian legend, but it was gigantic. It was sitting, hunched, on a throne of solid rock; its head brushed against the roof of the cave, some nine feet above the ground.

I said, “Oh, crap.”

Wong bowed low and said, “Great Truth Teller, we have come to seek your wisdom.”

I gaped and copied his motion. The thing, the Truth Teller, its hands were the size of chairs and looked like they’d been carved from basalt by a blind monk: each knuckle was as big as a human heart, with sheer edges and jagged corners.

“The truth,” it said slowly. Its voice was low and resonant, a deep rumbling bass I could feel in my feet and up through my skeleton. It sounded like chunks of gravel turning against each other. “Is within each of you.”

“Thank you,” Wong said. He rose and turned to walk away and grabbed me by the shoulder. “Strange,” he hissed, his fingers digging through my layers of sweat soaked furs, “let’s _go_.”

I stood up. I felt dazed. “Wait. That was it?”

I followed him out of the cave, tripping over loose stones I hadn't noticed on the way in. “We came all this way for that?” The cold hit my face like a slap. “For some fortune cookie bullshit? You have got to be shitting me.”


End file.
